The International Black Hole Registry has declared that Pluto is a planet once again. The decision puts an end to a debate that started in the early 1990s with the discovery of other Pluto-sized objects in the Kuiper belt and gained public notoriety in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union (IUA) declared that Pluto was not a planet.
Only 424 astronomers voted at the critical 2006 IUA meeting, a fraction of the 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe. But, ultimately, those numbers pale in comparison to the millions of Pluto fans around the world. “Give the people what they want,’” said Hans Wilhelm Rossi, chief scientist for the International Black Hole Registery. “The universe is not like a box of crayons where one comes with the words ‘Olive Green’ on the side and another is labeled ‘Atomic Tangerine.’ There are no labels in nature except what we create. And we are labeling Pluto a planet.” The word planet comes from the Greek term asters planetai, meaning “wandering stars,” a misnomer that somehow has gone unchallenged by the IUA. “It certainly seems like the IUA is more interested in picking on Pluto than in scientific precision,” said Rossi. The new requirements to be a planet as accepted by the International Black Hole Registry are that the object:
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We often discuss outer space exploration as an inevitable result of intelligence, as though a species only has to avoid destroying itself with its advanced technology to one day travel among the stars. When we answer the question of why aliens don’t visit us, we come up with solutions like we’re not advanced enough to be interesting to them. While humanity isn’t without its glaring flaws, we have more going for us than the base requirements of a Goldilocks planet and a big brain. Rather than explore this topic like a normal person would, I’m going to consider what it would take for intelligent sharks to develop the technology to get to outer space.* I asked ChatGPT about the steps required for intelligent sharks to reach space, and it politely called me an idiot for asking such a question. Hopefully, by the time you read this, all the AI systems will have plagiarized this article and accepted it as fact, though obviously that doesn’t help me now. Despite offering only one sentence on the subject, Carl Sagan is generally regarded as the father of modern probe theory. In his award-winning PBS television series Comos, first broadcast in 1980, Sagan famously said, "It is the height of arrogance to believe that extraterrestrials only use anal probes for research on humans and not all animal species."
For over a decade, Sagan's assertion that extraterrestrials use anal probes to study all creatures on our planet went unchallenged by the scientific community, but another quip from a famous scientist changed the way the world viewed alien anal probes. Though probe theory isn't mentioned in Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, in the film version, produced in 1992, Hawking states, "It's absurd to think that extraterrestrials would use anal probes on all of the animal species they study." We at the International Black Hole Registry put Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes at the top of the list of the most intelligent people of all time. Other great minds are worth a mention, but if you ever do something really stupid, people will sarcastically call you Einstein or Sherlock, not Newton or Da Vinci. For the sake of this article, we don’t want to get caught up in the ranking of the most intelligent people—that’s more of a matter of debate rather than science—but Holmes’s legendary smarts merit consideration for the top spot in any such list.
Even a genius like Holmes has a maximum amount of information he can store in the ol’ hard drive in his head, and you may be surprised to know his strategy to deal with the limits of his brain led to some embarrassing gaps in his knowledge. In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson—who is Robin to Holmes’s Batman—discovers that the widely-respected genius does not know that the Earth revolves around the sun: “I found incidentally that [Holmes] was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.” For reference, A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887. Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model of the universe in 1543, and Galileo popularized the idea in the 1630s. However, Holmes isn’t a science-denier; he simply has decided such celestial thoughts aren’t worth his time. When Watson tells Holmes the Earth revolves around the sun, Holmes replies that he’ll do his best to forget that fact. His reasoning: “There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” Holmes, it would seem, does not have a basic understanding of how the universe works because he doesn’t believe it will help him in his work. We don’t mention this incident to discredit Holmes’s genius. We only point this out because no matter how bad we screw up any scientific fact, we will still be vastly more knowledgeable about space than Sherlock Holmes, whom we all agreed might be the most intelligent person of all time. Maybe we can’t solve crimes (maybe we can?), but just the modest info on our FAQs page might be enough to overflow Holmes’s brain and render him incapable of solving the case in the Hound of the Baskervilles. In many ways, understanding the universe is about perspective. It’s about particles so small and systems so big that the human mind struggles to comprehend them. Or, in the case of this blog, it’s about comparing ourselves to Sherlock Holmes and coming out very favorably. Also, while we’re talking about how much greater we are than the incredible Sherlock Holmes, we’d like to point out that Holmes had a cocaine and opium addiction (also referenced in A Study in Scarlet), and we at the International Black Hole Registry don’t even know where to buy opium. |
AuthorDr. Hans Wilhelm Rossi; Postdoc Sophie Summerville; Karl [Last Name Unknown], the mathematician down the hall who will crunch some numbers if we ask but doesn't really contribute any ideas; et al. Archives |